Michael Winship: Will the Real Iraq Please Stand Up?

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship

Early last Wednesday morning, along a roadside, insurgents detonated an improvised explosive device (IED) as a United States Army Humvee passed. The vehicle lurched and stopped, smoke and fire pouring from the wreckage. A crowd of Iraqis gathered as ambulances arrived to take away the dead and wounded.

"Oh my God, where's my leg?" one soldier screamed from a stretcher. "I can't feel it anywhere. Somebody help me!"

Moments later, a sniper opened fire from a nearby rooftop. And to make a bad situation worse, a car bomb exploded. Then another.

Welcome to a typical day in Medina Jabal, a busy Iraqi desert outpost. But it's not in Iraq. Medina Jabal is one of a dozen mock Iraqi villages at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, built to train and test United States soldiers as they prepare for service in the Middle East.

The villages aren't exact replicas, although there are mosques and the sound of muezzins singing the call to prayer. In the sun and sand, plywood buildings and sheds and truck containers are used to approximate reality, sort of like the set for a surreal, Mesopotamian episode of "Deadwood."

Some of the Iraqi townspeople are real, others are Americans dressed in keffiyehs and dishdashas. Fake news crews representing a CNN-like network called "INN" and Aljazeera tape the action, reminding troops that the whole world may be watching what they do.

And the wounded GI? A plastic, anatomically correct dummy, his cries for help pre-recorded and blaring from a tiny loudspeaker hidden under the stretcher.

Last week, while working on a television documentary that will air next year, I spent a couple of days in the heat and dust of the Mojave at the National Training Center with the men and women of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, First Cavalry Division. They leave for Iraq in just a few weeks.

As always when I've been in the presence of active military, I came away impressed and moved by the dedication and hard work they put into their job and staggered by the youth of those who put their lives on the line in the service of their country.

I also was struck by how the military seems to be doing its damnedest to cope with and adjust to the unprecedented nature of the insurgency they're fighting, while severely handicapped by troop and equipment shortages.

Artillery and tank soldiers are at present trained to perform foot patrols and house-to-house searches just as infantry are. As one captain told us, "We're a Swiss Army knife now."

In the lawless world of today's Iraq, like it or not, every soldier's a cop. And because a suicide bomber or sniper can come at you anyplace and anytime, there's no such thing as "behind the lines" anymore. In fact, if nothing else, many said, the circumstances of this war have proven that women, often relegated to support roles in the past, can handle virtually any combat assignment.

But the sad truth is, for all the military's valiant, dangerous efforts, it isn't working. And in private, many of the brass at the top will tell you that. As hard as it may be to swallow, they say, we need to start getting out now.

Aparisim Ghosh reported in the August 6 issue of Time Magazine, "The sporadic spurts of violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis have given way to a steady stream of blood... Caught in the middle, the U.S. military is unable to halt the bloodshed...

"... Crime continues to soar, especially the booming business of kidnapping for ransom. U.S. officials say as many as 40 Iraqis are kidnapped every day. Ransom demands range from thousands of dollars to millions; many victims are never heard from again. Services are a cruel joke. As summer temperatures climb to 120 degrees, there has been no perceptible improvement in electricity or the water supply."

We're resented by the Muslim world as occupiers, not liberators, and to claim that this has not become a civil war is risible. Increasingly, the president's protests to the contrary become higher and shriller, sounding more and more like a teenager insisting the family car he wrecked wasn't his fault.

Instead, take the money -- we're already committed more than $300 billion to Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project -- and build goodwill by finally making a sincere, all-out effort to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, from power and water to schools and hospitals. Use the remaining military to protect such sites and to assist and train the Iraqi military and police.

Take the money and fight the real war on terrorism, both at home and abroad. Take the money to change the hearts and minds of the Islamic world with persuasion and positive deeds instead of preemptive war.

And negotiate. Diplomacy is key. Work harder to get the various Iraqi factions around the table. Do the same with the Palestinians and Israelis, the Israelis and the Lebanese, the Israelis and the Syrians. Start talking to Syria, start talking to Iran. Everything relates.

As former President Jimmy Carter told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel last week, "You never can be certain in advance that negotiations in difficult circumstances will be successful, but you can be certain in advance if you don't negotiate that your problem is going to continue and maybe even get worse."

In a comprehensive report in Sunday's Washington Post, succinctly titled, "What Next?" Daniel Byman of Georgetown's Center for Peace and Security Studies and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution added, "Washington will have to devise strategies to deal with refugees, minimize terrorist attacks emanating from Iraq, dampen the anger in neighboring populations caused by the conflict, prevent secession fever and keep Iraq's neighbors from intervening. The odds of success are poor, but, nonetheless, we have to try."

We slowly approach 3,000 Americans dead, 20,000 wounded. One in three returning home seek mental health care; one in six shows signs of anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder. Last month, the United Nations reported that the number of Iraqi civilian dead had quadrupled from just June to July.

In the face of all the overwhelming evidence, upstate New York Republican Congressman Randy Kuhl, one of President Bush's staunchest supporters, recently returned from a four day congressional visit to Iraq. "Most of the country is very, very safe," he insisted.

According to the Canandaigua Daily Messenger, Kuhl reported that, "From his vantage in a helicopter, he" took in such peaceful scenes in the lush countryside outside Baghdad as farmers working in their fields with tractors.

"Kuhl said he saw evidence of advances in Iraq, such as the construction of schools and sewer and water systems. He was impressed with the comfort of U.S. bases, invariably air-conditioned and served by top-notch cafeteria services."

Apparently, Rep. Kuhl received the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket tour of Iraq. Which makes me think that, in an odd way, out in the California desert, I saw a truer picture of Iraq than he did.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

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